A Woman's Place Is on the Internet – The New Yorker

Through the birth of her daughters and through the end of her marriage, Heather Armstrong has chronicled her personal and domestic ups and downs on her blog, Dooce.Credit Photograph by Tom Smart/The New York Times/Redux

In the early nineteen-seventies, the second-wave feminist movement seemed to be securing new territories moment by moment. Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” appeared on best-seller lists, and Ms. magazine was for sale on newsstands. Tens of thousands of women participated in the Women’s Strike for Equality, while Title IX and Roe v. Wade reformulated legislation governing women’s educational and reproductive rights. Amid these successes and the changing climate of expectations about what a woman’s life might, or should, consist of, the Wages for Housework campaign began with a group of feminists in Italy, in 1972, and grew to become a worldwide movement in the years that followed.

Advocates of wages for housework argued that the work of running a home, from cleaning the kitchen to cooking the meals to raising the children, was fundamental to the prevailing economic system, and yet went uncompensated. Such work typically fell to women, the argument held, and thus women were providing the unpaid labor upon which the productive labor of others, usually men, depended. To a certain extent, the argument was a theoretical one, part of a left-wing critique of the structure of capitalism. But its advocates also proposed more or less practical remedies: that the state should support services that provided child care, for example, or that women could be recompensed for their domestic labor through state-supplied disbursements funded by taxes or other means. Although the Wages for Housework campaign served as a consciousness-raising tool, it gradually lost momentum without accomplishing the practical gains it sought.

In a curious late-capitalist irony, however, a means of monetizing the work of the household has emerged over the past decade or so, in a form that would have been unimaginable to those early activists: the so-called—if odiously named—mommy blog. Rather than being paid by the state for their domestic labors, some women have taken to the Internet to give a narrative of their maternal and marital lives. A few among those women, who started out writing anecdotally for friends and family members, have—by originality, marketing savvy, luck, or some combination of the three—garnered an audience sufficiently large for Clorox or Burt’s Bees to help fund the enterprise. Mommy blogging has not, of course, been a panacea, remedying women’s undervaluation. In keeping with certain political ideals of the time, the Wages for Housework campaign sought to redistribute wealth more fairly. Mommy blogging, by contrast, offers rewards that only a few can reap—a divergence that mirrors the economic inequality that is the shameful signature of our time.

One of the most popular and profitable blogs of the genre is Dooce, which Heather Armstrong has been writing since the early aughts. Armstrong wasn’t a mother when she started her blog. She was a disaffected former Mormon, living in Los Angeles and writing, sometimes snarkily, about her life and work. When a co-worker came across Armstrong’s blog and anonymously brought it to the attention of her boss, Armstrong was fired—an event that only increased the blog’s reach. By 2003, having moved to Salt Lake City, Armstrong was married and pregnant. She continued to write candidly about her life even after being plunged into postpartum depression following the birth of a daughter, Leta. By 2004, her site was generating enough money through advertising for her husband to quit his job and manage it full time.

In the subsequent years, through the birth of a second daughter and through the end of her marriage, Armstrong has chronicled her personal and domestic ups and downs: “Valentine’s Day at Chez Armstrong was a rather dismal affair primarily because we spent the majority of the day lying in bed next to Leta as she projectile-vomited two-day-old Pirate’s Booty across the pink and yellow stripes of our Isaac Mizrahi sheets,” is typical of the tone. She’s also published a best-selling memoir, “It Sucked And Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita,” and has been cited on Forbes lists of the most influential women in media. In 2011, she was profiled in the Times magazine, in a story that reported estimated profits for her site between thirty and fifty thousand dollars a month.

Armstrong’s blog was funny, with a carefully curated appearance of candor about herself and her child-rearing practices. Though she posted photos of her daughters looking adorable, she also sometimes wrote about them with the same sardonic tone in which she had formerly written about her workplace. In a post about weaning her elder daughter from snacking on treats, she wrote, “This is about teaching her to eat when she’s hungry and stopping when she’s full. This is also very much about making her suffer.” But Armstrong also showed how larger issues had an impact upon life in the home, and she used her blog to advocate for causes she supported, such as health-care reform. Armstrong’s tone was always intimate, as if she were writing to a group of friends, even when she was writing about experiences garnered by virtue of her Internet celebrity, such as being invited to speak at the White House about family and workplace issues.

A little more than a week ago, Armstrong used that blog to announce that she was giving up blogging in order to concentrate on the other opportunities that her platform has given her, as a brand consultant and a public speaker. Partly, she explained, the change was prompted by the fulfillment she had found in drawing upon different skills, and the desire to try new things. But her withdrawal was also due to the changing online climate, she wrote. The medium she had pioneered was being displaced by newer forms of communication. “Everything has been reduced to a small square on a phone,” she wrote. “Attention spans are now 140 characters long, sometimes as short as a video or a picture that self-destructs in a few seconds.”

Moreover, she wrote, maintaining Dooce was taking a personal and emotional toll that was no longer tolerable—an experience she had discovered that she shared with others who had started out in the early years of blogging. She wrote of “the security systems we’ve had to set up as an increasingly more diverse group of people throw rocks at our houses with the intention of causing damage: passersby, rubbernecks, stalkers, even journalists. We have separate security systems for those who take every word and decision we share and deliberately misinterpret it, disfigure it to the point of it being wholly unrecognizable, and then broadcast to us and to their own audiences that they have diagnosed us with a personality disorder.”

In this respect, Armstrong’s experience mirrors that of other women who may not have found a way to leverage their lives into a lucrative living, but who have found that expressing themselves online can lead to vociferous disapprobation. The phenomenon of Internet misogyny—often anonymous, usually vitriolic, and sometimes scarily violent—has, of necessity, become a pressing preoccupation for contemporary feminists, just as the issue of unpaid labor was for activists of the early seventies. Women are afflicted disproportionally by online abuse, with trolls apparently lying in wait for those whose online speech is perceived as being too outspoken. “The experience of women online is the great link between speech and violence, between offense and abuse,” Choire Sicha wrote recently, in a perspicacious review of Jon Ronson’s book about online ganging-up, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.” The frontiers of feminism have shifted since the seventies, when both the Wages for Housework campaign and Heather Armstrong were born. But if we have gone a long distance toward disproving the notion that a woman’s place is in the home, we are still discouragingly far from it being widely understood and accepted that a woman’s place might, safely, be online.